Before his cableship service on CS Faraday, James Cope had worked for Siemens Brothers as an "Improver (Fitter and Turner)" from 1900 to 1906. He was employed again by Siemens from 1908 to 1913, the period which included his shipboard service, leaving on 31 December 1913, after which he signed on with the Mackay-Bennett. When Cope left Siemens, the company wrote him a letter of recommendation, which noted his service as a "Deck Engineer" on Cable Ship Faraday on five expeditions. The Siemens Magazine for March 1928 records the death of James Joseph Cope on January 31st of that year. Other members of the Cope family also worked at Siemens in Woolwich. In the previous generation James's father, John Cope, entered the works in 1897 and retired as foreman of the Blacksmiths Shop in 1928. James's wife, and his children Joe, Jack, Bert, and Olive, were all at Siemens at some point. John Hearsham (Jack) Cope, the father of the present John Cope, worked there as a Fitter from 1922 to 1928; Bert worked for Siemens from about 1930 through World War II; Olive was head of the typing pool. James Cope's Continuous Certificate of Discharge (images below) shows voyages dated from 1910 through 1914 as follows:
All except the last voyage were cable related. The Faraday voyages listed as "North Atlantic", and the 1914 Mackay-Bennett voyage were most likely repair operations. The North Atlantic route had many cables, and repairs were a substantial part of the work for cableships in that part of the world. The voyage listed as "Arendal" in 1910 was to lay a cable connecting Newbiggin by the Sea in England to Arendal in Norway. The cable was laid by Siemens Bros for the Norwegian PTT and the British GPO, and was 411 nm in length. The 1913 cable noted as "Dutch East Indies" was laid by Siemens Bros for the government of the Netherlands East Indies. The inter-island cable system was established in 1882, and the cable of 1913, 1347 nautical miles in length, was an extension to the existing network. |
Copyright © 2007 FTL Design
Last revised: 27 February, 2008
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